Envirothon team gives presentation

Members of Lanesville’s FFA Envirothon Team, which advanced to state competition this year, led off with their award-winning presentation at last week’s monthly meeting of the Lanesville Community School Corp. Board of Trustees.
The Envirothon Team explained in detail how it could convert existing farmland into a pasture for Angus cows and do it in the most cost-efficient manner.
After the presentation, school superintendent Steve Morris gave his report and briefly discussed how future teacher evaluations would be conducted. Morris said that the corporation would move away from the RISE model it currently uses and go with a revised version of RISE.
The corporation will use the RISE rubric for the evaluations, which will be based on 80-percent instruction and 20 percent in student growth.
In another matter, Morris said the corporation will need to adopt three policies, including a restraint and seclusion policy (what not to do to kids), an anti-gang policy (how to deal with gangs) and an anti-bullying policy (train employees and students and report to the Dept. of Education each year with how many bullying incidents and how they were addressed).
‘With the Internet, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Snapchat, it’s going to be put onto the schools to deal with bullying even if it happens away from school,’ Morris said. ‘There will be consequences at school.’
Wrapping up the superintendent’s report, Morris told the board that the Prosser Career Education Center in New Albany may consider asking schools that use its services to help with a bond of between $62 million to $67 million to renovate and update the facility. According to figures released by Prosser, 42 percent of juniors and seniors who attend Lanesville attend Prosser, making it the highest percentage among participating schools. Numbers for the other three county high schools are 41 percent from South Central, 28 percent from Corydon Central and 19 percent from North Harrison.
During the principal’s report, Marsha Himmelhaver said 19 new students have enrolled at Lanesville Elementary, bringing the number expected to enroll for the next school year to be about 342.
For the high school principal’s report, Morris said 96 percent ‘ all but two students ‘ who took the English 10 test as part of Indiana’s Graduation Qualifying Exam for sophomores passed, 79 percent (up from last year) passed Algebra I testing and 55 percent (down from last year) passed biology testing. Though percentages were down from last year in biology, there were more pass-plus grades and two students received perfect scores of 800.
In another matter, the board approved a donation of $885 to the athletic department from Dale (Chip) White of Chip’s Lawn Service for maintenance of the baseball and soccer fields.
The board approved the extension of maternity leave for Erin Boone, extended the maternity leave contract of Sara Wise, approved the retirement of Veronica Hobbs who has been with the corporation for more than 20 years, approved intersession contracts of Brian Book, Allison Schalk and Pam Johnson, approved the transfer of Lisa Hammond from second-grade teaching to temporary high-ability coordinator, approved the hiring of Brittany Gayhart as teacher and approved Catherine Freiberger as a temporary teacher at Lanesville Elementary.